things dave has discovered, brought to you by wordpress & 1and1

Vote it Up

This is a WordPress plugin for counting and displaying votes. I used from 2012 to 2014.

It’s web site is at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vote-it-up/ It has a voting widget and display and a most popular articles widget. It has not been updated for over two years so maybe not the best to use, but I like it’s look and feel.

Caution: This plugin is no longer actively developed. While security updates may be delivered, new features are not likely.

Display Vote Widget – Autumn 2014

1st Dec 2014 – Something changed so that the Display of Votes in the index and single pages no longer works. This is a shame. I have documented this at the wordpress fourm, see here…. The developer log was last updated as at August 2014. There seems no reply so best to document here. Today I performed the following tests,

I changed the display widget’s skin.

I viewed the database table both xx_votes and xx_voteiu_data, which have 402 & 25 records respectively. It would seem that the insert methods are working.

Further examination of the plugin code, makes it clear that there is a database schema change, but I don’t think that’s the problem.

I viewed the scores through the wordpress dashboard page, they all report 0. This is not what is held in the tables. I can’t seem to update the records through this interface either.

I pressed the rollback the database version button, nothing seemed to happen and it continues to show that db version is 3000.

It seems the file importdb.php has the repair functionality. How to run it?

I have backed up the table, I have deactivated an deleted the plugin and reinstalled it, twice. The second time I deleted the database tables, I have inserted some records in the new table using the widget. It’s still displaying 0 votes. I have deactivated it.

Widget CSS

1st Nov 2014 – I have used the sidebar widget “Most Voted Post” on http://blog.davelevy.info, this does not inherit the sidebar CSS and looks odd. I put up with this for two years, it would seem. I have decided to look at this. The plugin support page, has an old thread which documents the php that creates the widget contents. Each element is contained within a class called votemicrotext which is contained with in a class, votelistind. I can try and covert this into an <LI> tag which is what the author suggests or try and amend the CSS. The latter approach means I can keep my amendments in the child theme folders. The former requires me to amend the plugin which is not forward compatible with changes from the author, although they haven’t issued a change in a while. The <LI> approach seems easier; decoding the CSS will be hard.

ooOOOoo

In order to install, you need to edit some of the .php files.

With the zbench theme, used for this wiki and the next version of the blog, I edited themes/zbench/index.php & themes/zbench/comments.php

I inserted the code <?php DisplayVotes(get_the_ID()); ?> after the following comments.

index.php after <!– End Entry –> and

comments.php after <!– You can start editing here –>

The little box of the ticker seems a bit bare, so I wanted to decorate it. I wanted some text, and started as a bit lazy, I tried to use a table, I wanted the tweetbutton plugin object next to it and decided to use a float left property, the tweetbutton is 20 px high, hence the row is 20px high.